September 12, 2004

2-mile wide mushroom cloud spotted in North Korea. According to the Washington Post, the Bush administration had received recent intelligence reports that may indicate North Korea was preparing to conduct its first nuclear weapons test explosion.
posted by rolypolyman 20 years ago
  • Flash!
  • This happened on Thursday but apparently the newswires did not get hold of this story until tonight.. go figure.
  • Operation Nu Korea.
  • This is bad news for Kerry. Why? Bush is the sitting president! Yabbut BUsh's numbers go up when people are afraid. I doubt it. Bush has, afterall, allowed the NK situation to ferment this long. That doesn't matter. People will think "Thank God we took out Saddam, or that bomb might have gone off in Portland, OR." What?! Saddam didn't have even a single nuke. He didn't even have the capability to build a nuke! Saddam probably just sold his nukes to NK. Besides, Kerry would have let France control our military. What are you talking about? Kerry has said that he would take a more active interest in NK! Yeah, Kerry will send troops to NK and then fight for Kim's army! You're just being ridiculous. Why don't you go play with the kerning on your Word? I don't care what you say, this is all bad news for Kerry.
  • My cell phone version of CNN insinuated that it was a forest fire, but not before the Yahoo Alert interrupted my din-din. What does this mean?
  • Oh, don't be so sentimental. Things explode everyday.
  • This type of explosion can only have been produced by Microsoft Word. Not true. Typewriters were able to produce mushroom clouds as early as 1945.
    From those jokers on dKos.
  • badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger mushroom
  • The North Koreans, when they do their first nuclear test, they'll do it underground right? They are not stupid enough to do it in the atmosphere.
  • I would think they would do it where every one can see it .. look at us we've got the BOMB. North Korea cloud 'not nuke blast', reports CNN.
  • Chinese sources say it was an explosion, according to Chosunilbo. But who knows -- it looks like a lot of conflicting stories. I'll hope CNN is right.
  • well if an unamed "US official" says a forest fire can create a mushroom cloud, that certainly makes sense.... if NK does have nukes, whats the big deal? They would never use them on us because we would know who did it they would be subject to instant retaliation-- there are tons of former Soviet nukes floating around unnaccounted for, and Bush cut funding for the programs to find and destroy them.
  • if NK does have nukes, whats the big deal? Mutual assured destruction only works as long as everyone is afraid of it. The moment one bugger steps up to the plate and says "Bring it on!", it's "game over" for everyone.
  • What drivingmenuts said; moreover, North Korea, like Pakistan and Israel, has a track record of selling weapons technology to rogue states or groups that would be designated terrorists these days.
  • i dunno about you, but you'd think all the warbloggers, keyboard warriors and so on would be howling for this opportunity to bomb ninety-three kinds of crap out of another small nation with easily generalised ethnic groups... Iraq is dangerous, North Korea isn't? How does that follow? (actually after a rational explanation that doesn't thunder its way through already disproven facts...)
  • Nuclear weapons can be so useful intact, it seems a shame to actually detonate them. I don't know if the mushroom cloud is the result of an atomic blast. It does seem, though, that North Korea's desire to possess nuclear weapons could be a diplomatic and sociological endeavor primarily and a military one secondarily. I certainly hope such is the case.
  • prismatic7: your view of warbloggers is too clouded with your own biases. Not all of them want to 'bomb ninety-three kinds of crap out of another small nation'. I'll remind you that even (presumably) rational people like John Kerry and John Edwards were in favour of the Iraq war. The argument for not going into NK now is simple: it would mean that Seoul and possibly Tokyo would be flattened. NK already has a shitload of missiles trained on Seoul, and if they really have nukes they can easily lob a couple across the Japan Sea. The US is now reduced to eliminating the potential buyers of NK's nukes. This means Al Qaeda like terrorist groups and the so-called rogue states. In other words, what the War on Terror should be doing. We will eventually have to do something about NK, but right now the US is too alone and in deep shit to start another war.
  • fuyugare: ta. (and i never pretended not to be biased... although i realise there are warbloggers who are anti-war, as well, whom i tarred with the nasty brush. sorry.) what measures are being taken to ensure that NK don't flog off their baby bombs? like, say, the US enforcing UN and IAEA non-proliferation treaties? And, for the record, wasn't it Pakistan who sold NK the parts? Is ther some kind of diplomatic effort to get Pakistan to disarm?
  • Somebody set up us the bomb! You have no chance to survive, make your time. sorry, but you knew someone would say it eventually, this being the internet and everything....
  • We havn't had any reports in from seismic staions, which would confirm what kind of a blast this is. This would seem to indicate that it was not a nuclear explosion, as that would be big news. Furthermore, there's been no reports in the specialist security press, as far as I can tell. Taken together, that would indicate to me that this is not the result of a nuclear test. On the other hand, given that this story 'blew up' over the weekend (I'm sorry), we should hear more tomorrow. McSly: they don't have to let a bomb off the atmosphere to announce that they have nukes. We can detect an underground test pretty easily.
  • the_bone: what I found most interesting about that AYBABTU thing is that in the original Japanese the 'All your base are belong to us' line is: 'kampouseifu no go-kyouryoku ni yori, kimitachi no kichi wa, subete CATS ga itadaita', i.e., 'Thanks to help from the (US) govt., CATS has obtained control of all your bases.'
  • Oops, I had bad info. Wikipedia says it was kampouseifugun, which is more like 'federal forces' than 'federal govt.'.
  • Uh-oh
  • Geez, the North Koreans should know better than to do this in October when Bush is looking for freedom-oriented "brownie points".
  • fuyugare: yeah, but even so... that's pretty funny.
  • prismatic7, you don't understand. Pakistan are a doubleplusgood ally of the US, like Saudi Arabia. In light of this, actual facts about their sponsorship of rogue states and terrorist groups are irrelevant.
  • I am beginning to wonder about the conventional wisdom that "there's tons of old Soviet nukes floating around." On the one hand, it's completely plausible. On the other hand, it's been ten years. Who has these things?
  • What about weather satellites? We've been getting nice hurrican and typhoon pics, wouldn't there be some from that date, showing something (thus confirming the reports) or nothing?
  • Satellites have confirmed that there was an explosion big enough to create a crater visible from space. The causes are still in doubt.
  • Ok, a little myth clearing up here: There are no missing former Soviet nuclear weapons. So you don't have to worry about somebody stealing a nuke and holding the world to ransom, a la Dr Evil. There are a few grams of radioactive material from a research facility that went missing. This stuff could be used for a dirty bomb, but not for a fission bomb. After a day of reports it seems next to certain that the 'cloud' in DPRK was not caused by a nuclear explosion. The only way this could still be a nuke is if the Americans, South Koreans, Chinese and Japanese were all conspiring to cover it up. At any rate, we will find out for shure tomorrow when the seisemic data comes in. There is absolutely no way the DPRK could fire off a nuclear weapon without us knowing about it. (a) the flash would be easily visible from space, as well as from across the Chinese boarder, (b) airborne radioactive isotopes would be easily detectible, (c) most importantly, the international seismic network would pick it up. Unlike satelites, the network of seismic stations is controled by the scientific community, so even if four major governments did decide to carry out a massive coverup (and there's no reason they'd want to), and actually got away with it, we would still find out about it tomorrow. The information about a 'crater vissible from space' is unconfirmed and strikes me as being highly doubtful. Firstly, it doesn't mesh with what we're hearing from highly placed people like US State Department officials. If there was really a crater, why would they be suggesting this might be a forrest fire? Secondly, the phrase 'vissible from space' is the kind of thing people say if they don't know much about overhead reconessance. After all, cars and trucks are vissible from space if you have a powerful enough telescope. It is, however, something that pops up a lot in popular culture, and thus a perfect candidate for being included as a false detail, as it's the kind of thing people expect to hear. Is there a crater? I don't know. Has it been spotted? I would be leary of believing so until we get actual pictures.
  • We're told all the time that there are sats out there that can read the newprint in our papers so what does a crater visible from space really mean nowadays? On preview - what Dreadnought said.
  • Actually, zimf, there aren't any satelites that can read newsprint from space. The atmosphere causes too much interference for that. IIRC, the best they can do is some significant fraction of a meter (although we don't know exactly what fraction of a meter).
  • The cloud was apparently the result of the demolition of a mountain. And "suggestions that it was anything else are lies"!!!
  • I wouldn't be surprised if this was another accidental detonation of something rocket related. Rocket fuel production facility, maybe spare rocket storage, Dr. Evil style rocket launch center hidden beneath mountain "lake". I recall seeing video of a rocket fuel center fire (and subsequently large boom, estimated at 1-kiloton nuclear free-air-burst (250 tons ground burst)) in Nevada on Max-Ex once, and the energy released was quite tremendous. I recall hearing something like the space shuttle is equivalent to a 1 megaton bomb (only in that case we're vectoring the energy release and stretching it out over a long period of time). Or maybe it's the secret cache of artillery shells needed to invade a traitorous China or Russia. Or maybe they wanted to have the biggest Burning Man festival ever. Plenty of explanations possible. (I know, I know, all LIES created by the evil imperial American capitalistic running dogs.)
  • Dreadnought - there were photos out there (not classified) which showed the effects of correcting in real time for atmospheric disturbance. I've tried to (re)find them a couple of times and failed, so you'll have to take my word, but a telescope with a relatively small corrected primary (8 inches if I recall) could take images of a car 10 km away which almost resolved the characters on the numberplate.
  • some more information on adaptive optics is available at the FAS